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Saturday, May 6, 2017

#1831: Melba Ketchum

A legend in crank circles, Melba Ketchum, a veterinarian by
trade, is probably today’s leading, uh, expert on Bigfoot. Ketchum claims to have sequenced Bigfoot DNA and found it to be a new species of hominid that
is a hybrid of Homo sapiens and some other species. Yes: Bigfoot arose some
15,000 years ago when some cryptids had sex with modern human females,
resulting in hairy hominin hybrids. According to a 2012 press release,
which described their five-year long DNA study “currently under peer-review”, Ketchum and her team obtained three “whole nuclear genomes from purported
Sasquatch samples. The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch mtDNA is
identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch nuDNA is a novel, unknown
hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species.” Of course, the
obvious conclusion to draw (further reasons here)
from sequencing showing that Sasquatch mtDNA is identical to modern Homo
sapiens, is that her samples were human DNA,
but “obvious” is just a repressive tactic of the establishment.

It is also unclear how they determined that the samples were
really from a Bigfoot:
If they took a blood or saliva sample from a living Bigfoot one may wonder why
they didn’t capture or photograph it; if the samples were just found, it is a
bit unclear how do they determined that they weren’t left by another animal or
hiker. At least Ketchum has (on a different occasion) claimed to have obtained her DNA samples from a blueberry bagel left in the backyard of
a Michigan woman who claims that 10 Sasquatch creatures visit her property on a
regular basis. Here’s a video recording they made of the beast. Isn’t it unfortunate that it just
happens to be so out-of-focus?

It is, however, telling that Ketchum refused to let anyone
else see her evidence. She did, however, release a statement requesting that
the U.S. government immediately recognize Bigfoot as “an indigenous people and immediately protect their human and
Constitutional rights.”

When the paper predictably failed to clear peer review,
Ketchum responded by buying an existing journal,
renaming it (De Novo) and releasing a
special edition containing one paper: her own. According to Ketchum, the
standard venues used peer-reviewers that were too close-minded (“I am calling it the ‘Galileo Effect’,” said Ketchum),
and “Denovo, the new journal is aimed at
offering not only more choices and better service to scientists wanting to
submit a manuscript, but also reviewers and editors that will be fair, unlike
the treatment we have received.” At least she can now claim to have the
results published in a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s what matters. The
paper is discussed here;
some comments from geneticists are here.

Ketchum is at present still running the Sasquatch genome
project, which at the very least sports an awfully formatted webpage. It should
probably be a cause of some concern that Ketchum, in her bio, states that she “provides professional forensic consultation
and testimony in legal cases.” It would be a pity not to use the skills and
techniques acquired from sequencing a Sasquatch genome for public good, such as
sending people to jail.

Her team, listed here for future reference, consists of:

-Patrick Wojkiewicz, “Director of the Shreveport
Laboratory of the North Louisiana Crime Lab System and the Technical Leader of
the DNA section.”

-Tom Prychitko, “laboratory director at Helix Biological
Laboratory, a biological testing firm he established in 2009,” and who
apparently has a long backstory of Sasquatch hunting and DNA testing.

-Fan Zhang, “Bioinformatician at the Department of
Academic and Institutional Resources and Technology, University of North Texas
Health Science Center.”

-Ray Shoulders and Ryan Smith (no biographical
information given).

Diagnosis: A prime example of how cargo cult science operates, complete with vanity labs and vanity journals. Of course, Ketchum and
her gang are mostly pretty harmless and fun, but other pseudoscientists in
other fields using the same sorts of approaches and techniques are not.